


The day the Rose Tyler-Noble should have died

by jennavanawesome



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/F, F/M, Reunion, Rose is a time lady, banana daquiries
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-04 10:22:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5330648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jennavanawesome/pseuds/jennavanawesome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose Tyler has died before and has always come back stronger. But after over a hundred years of of a full and happy life lived, she's ready to take her next adventure into the afterlife. She just never expected it to end this way. A look into the day Rose Tyler-Noble died and what came after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Not quite a death

Rose Marion Tyler-Noble died on a Monday, because Sunday would have been too boring a day to start her final journey. She died with a smile on her lips, surrounded by her three daughters and their spouses; her many grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and the few great-great grandchildren having already said their goodbyes. She had lived to the ripe old age of 127, which, even with the technological and biological advancements in anti-aging and disease prevention, was way past the average life span of 114 that humans couldn't seem to advance past. However, Rose Tyler-Noble had the advantage of having an extremely active life, access to cutting edge experimental research, and remnants of the time-vortex embedded in her very genome. Now this last factor in all probability should have been detrimental to her well-being, but after 100 years of watching and waiting for something to happen, it seemed that the only side effects were positive: she healed faster than a normal human, had slightly enhanced telepathic and empathetic abilities, a keener sense of time, and a slightly slower aging process. However, when her husband of 102 years passed away only about a month or so earlier (on a Saturday, much to his pleasure), she felt that it was her time to move on as well, and her body reacted accordingly.

Doctor Jonathan "the Doctor, John, and/or the Oncoming Babble" Noble was more of biological marvel than even his wife. No one quite knew his real age, which was further complicated by the fact that he quite literally sprouted as a fully-grown adult. He shared many of the traits that the time vortex had given his wife: the telepathy, accelerated healing and decelerated aging, and although he technically had an even better sense of time than she, he was perpetually late. His peculiar biology was due to a third strand of DNA and the fact that he was half Gallifrayen, an ancient alien species that no longer existed and had never existed in this particular universe. John, unlike a full Time Lord, had only one heart and this led to many deviations from what could be expected in his lifetime. He had no respiratory bypass (much to his chagrin) and though his lifespan was elongated slightly, it was nowhere near the thousands of years it could have been. However, this suited him just fine. He had once made an offer on a beach, ("I've only got one life, Rose Tyler. I could spend it with you. If you want.") and this was the way he could fulfill his vows. So he settled into being human, but he never settled down. This suited his wife just fine, she was never one for domestics anyways.

The births of three baby girls over a decade and a half helped to quell some of the need for adventure, especially because they seemed to have inherited their fathers talent for getting in trouble and were as jeopardy friendly as their mother. Donna Susan Noble, the eldest, had once broken her leg after falling while attempting to jump from one tree branch to another and had driven her mother crazy when she and her father had "improved" her wheelchair so it now functioned as a hovercraft. Sarah Jane Noble, who was never just a middle child, had once nearly burnt down the school when a particularly enthusiastic science experiment went wrong after she got distracted (a habit she picked up from her father) and mixed the wrong chemical solution. Martha Andrea Noble, the baby of the family, was a bit quieter, but as a child had a habit of protecting others against bullies that left her with more than a few bruises over the years. These childhood passions, as they often do, evolved into more career like pursuits as they aged. Donna had taken the mantel of Torchwood field operative and had risen to the rank of director as her mother and grandfather had done before her. Like her mother and grandfather, she always managed to be out in the field for the saving the world events, never content to be behind a desk for too long. Sarah had put her love of the stars and natural curiosity to good use as an astrological researcher and mechanical engineer, discovering ways to view more of the universe from good old Sol 3. Martha had gone on to work for the United Nations, heading the committee that was charged with extra-terrestrial relations and creating global policies for negotiations with alien cultures. All three women wore their hair as their natural brunette, even while their mother had kept her hair dyed blonde until it had stubbornly faded to white. Donna was stick-thin like the Doctor, Sarah had his height, and Martha was nice mix of the two but had her mothers full lips; all were incredibly intelligent (clever they would say) and had inherited the restlessness found in both of their parents. They were happy and extremely close and even the introduction of spouses and children did little to break them apart.

So when Rose Tyler-Noble gave one last tongue-touched grin as she laid in her bed in the room that her and her husband had shared for just over a 102 years, and closed her eyes with an accompanying sigh, it was no surprise when three identical cries sounded by three distraught daughters. Two husbands and a wife gathered them into their arms, tears streaming down every face in the room, with silence except for the sound of sobbing lingering as no one could quite yet put emotions into words. What was a surprise was when a gasp came from the prone figure of the late Rose Tyler-Noble, complemented by a blinding flash of golden light. When the spots cleared from the occupants of the room's eyes, they had to blink again to verify that what they were seeing was in fact real: On the bed where Rose Tyler-Noble had just died of heartache and old age, sat a gasping young 20-something looking girl. Gone was the peaches and cream skin, in its place was cinnamon and clove, short silver hair was now a wavy, deep mahogany brown that curled gently beneath the swell of her breasts. This stranger was still curvy and she had similar full lips, shaped differently but still luscious. However, when she looked up and met the eyes of the gaping occupants of the room, she was a stranger no longer. The same impossibly golden whiskey eyes shared by every female in the Tyler-Noble line gazed around the room, meeting with three identical expressions of shock and amazement. Silence reigned for a heartbeat and then a double heartbeat, and the reborn Rose Tyler spoke her first words in this new body. Looking back she wished that she could have said something brilliant, but regeneration had the habit of striking most clever thoughts out of your mind in favor of stating the obvious, ("Hello! Okay–ooh. New teeth. That's weird.") and so it went, " Well… that was unexpected."


	2. Killing time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being dead sure is a lot of work

The Doctor knew the moment that the Meta-crisis died. It was as though a window that had been left open just enough to let in the murmur of noises from outside, but not open enough to really notice, had been slid shut and his mind was just a tiny bit quieter. Had the Time Lords still been around, he never would have detected it, like a whisper in Time Square, but as they were not, the silence echoed around his lonely mind just a bit. He had known that the bond with the Meta-crisis had endured them being in two separate universes for about a century of linear time now. Every once in a long while the connection had widened enough for some strong emotions to slip through, and the part of him that wasn't intolerably jealous or angry was glad to observe that the times of joy that slipped through had far outnumber the times of fear, sadness, or anger. However, that portion of him was considerably smaller than the part that contained the jealousy he felt towards the Meta-crisis for getting to live a lifetime with Rose Tyler, or the part that held the devastation that he had lost her again by a conscious decision on his own making. So those and all emotions towards Rose Tyler had been figuratively boxed away in a special shoe box after his regeneration and put mentally out of sight in a closet where he wouldn't be faced daily with his loss (a trick he had learned from a teen magazine he once read while waiting for Amy). That being said, he didn't much appreciate the Meta-crisis telepathically rubbing it in his face, or mind, that he was Rose Tyler fantastic life and the Doctor was not. The first time it had happened, the Doctor was still in his last regeneration and grieving the loss of Donna and Rose. He had been traveling alone, which had only intensified his anger at the unfairness of the universe and had been in the middle of a disastrous trip to Mars when he had felt it. All around him, death and panic reigned supreme, when blooming out of the back if his conscienceless came the slight petals of joy, love and ecstasy that could only have come from the Meta-crisis during a very specific event. Needless to say the Doctor had not handled it very well, and the Time Lord Victorious had been born.

But now that the inevitable had finally happened, the Doctor felt no sense of relief. As he sat staring at the center console (brooding others would and had called it), he was happy that the Ponds were currently not on board the TARDIS and that his wife hadn't popped in unexpectedly. He now had an opportunity to pull out the box and reminisce on the happy times he had shared with the woman that had saved him and that he could now admit to loving. For the first time he allowed himself to wonder if she was still alive or if she had passed on first, he wondered if she had become a mother, and if she had settled down into domestic life (he doubted it), but mostly he wondered if she had ever thought of him. He couldn't regret taking her back to Pete's Universe and giving her a chance at a normal life, not if she was happy, but he was selfish enough to hope that she had still loved him as the Doctor even after all this time. But he would never know because the Meta-crisis was dead, and so was his last connection to Rose Tyler.  
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 

About a month later there was a vibration along the line that tickled the spot in the Doctor's mind where the bond had been. He absolutely noticed it, but retaining the memory proved to be a bit difficult. The moment he turned and looked away from Silence, it was stored away deep in his memory and forgotten.  
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 

For being dead, Rose Tyler sure had a lot to do. After the shock had worn off enough for her mind to start working properly again, at an even higher processing speed than before, Rose was able to catalogue all the changes that had occurred within her body. She filed away the cooler body temperature, increased respiratory ability and bone density, but while this was subconsciously and instantaneously being stored away for further exploration, she focused in on the double heartbeat and all of the implications that came with it. So when the cacophony of voices burst through as the humans in the room moved past their shock, she had a few hypothesis she could share with them. The most probable theory was that when she became Bad Wolf, the TARDIS had seen that she wished to be with the Doctor for as long as his forever would be, not just for hers. However, her human body as it was would not survive a regeneration cycle, but the TARDIS saw every possible timeline and the strongest included Rose Tyler undergoing over a century of slow transformation by the remnants of the time vortex into what was known as human plus, and so, when the moment of death had come about, it was a short gap to close to finish the metamorphosis.

That being said, the next question was what she did now. She had prepared for her death, all the details were sorted, and the only thing that was wanting was the actual body to put in the coffin. Now that that plan had gone all to hell, Rose Tyler, Time Lady, had some options. Only six people plus herself knew the truth of what had happened, and she had undergone such a radical transformation that for all intents and purposes she was dead to everyone else. She could try and prove to everyone she was still alive and still the same person, but that didn't seem like it would lead to pleasant results. She could form a new life under another name, and this way she would be able to be close with her family, but they were already quite advanced along their timelines and would get older and when the six in the room passed on, no one would remain who knew whom she really was. Besides, she didn't want to build a new life, she had just made it to the finish line of her last one and it wasn't like she had made contingency plans for this. The last option was to try and find her way back to the prime universe and the Doctor, who was the reason for the change in the first place. This one seemed the most impossible and had the most unknowns: was the Doctor even alive still or had he burned through his remaining regenerations? Would he still want her by his side or had he moved on? Oddly enough, the idea of getting through to the other universe was of the lowest priority on her worry scale. She had done it once as a human, so advancing the technology that already existed with her new Time Lady brain seemed simple enough, and she wasn't in any rush anyways. First she had a funeral to get through.

In the end she decide on a combination of the making a new life and searching for the Doctor. She kept Rose as her first name, but changed her last to Harkness. Smith had been her first thought, in honor of Mickey and the original Sarah Jane, but it seemed to be a bit presumptuous to take the name of the Doctor's alias when she wasn't even sure of what he wanted, let alone what she did. So she had picked the last name of one of her dearest friends and who was also facing a much longer life than originally planned on. (John had told her all about what had happened on Satellite 5 when it had become apparent that there were some lingering effects). She started working at Torchwood again and at the recommendation of the previous director and board member (Donna), headed a team that focused on inter-dimensional travel. She was introduced as a new alien arrival to Earth that was looking for a way to get home to a parallel world, was given a new identity under the new name and began working to once again cross the void. 20 years passed, and while she barely aged, those around her very noticeably did.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Donna Susan Noble died on a Thursday afternoon (much to her displeasure) at the ripe old age of 120, beating that pesky average just like her mother. Like her mother and grandfather before her, those who had worked with her at Torchwood and all that who had known her mourned her passing, but none so much as her husband, two sisters and 4 children. Rose Harkness, an old family friend, had been at her side with the aforementioned group of people, when Donna had breathed her last goodbye. But while a chorus of mourning had broken out around her, she merely sat with an expectant look on her still young face. Donna's children merely shrugged it of as an alien thing and in their grief thought no more about the unusual behavior. Only when minutes had turned into an hour, and then another and the body had been taken away to be prepared for cremation, did the face morph into one of sorrow and grim determination. Rose Harkness made her preparations, and Rose Tyler said goodbye to her children one last time. The dimension manipulator had been tested and was ready to be used for its intended purpose. For the safety of the multiverse, she was taking one of two manipulators; the other was to be destroyed upon the death of her last daughter, barring regeneration. That way, if Sarah or Martha did by chance regenerate, they would be able to come search for Rose if they so chose. Mother's duty done, she gave one last look full of love and pride and disappeared from a shoreline about 50 miles outside of Bergen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, any of the lines that come from DW, or characters, but this was written by my overactive imagination.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this idea has been floating around in my head for a few days now, and since I don't have finals or papers to write I guess I wrote this instead.
> 
> Also, first lines from regeneration on the New Who are great (not counting Tennant's kind of, sort of regeneration):
> 
> 10- "Hello! Okay–ooh. New teeth. That's weird"
> 
> 11- "Legs! I've still got legs!"
> 
> 12- "Kidneys! I've got new kidneys! I don't like the colour."
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, any of the lines that come from DW, or characters, but this was written by my overactive imagination.


End file.
